Dr. Craig Munroe, a key advisor to Myka Labs as well as Associate Chief for Clinical Innovation for the UCSF Health GI Division, presented at the American Gastrointestinal Society 2022 Tech Summit on how patients with malignant gastric outlet obstruction and other GI tract conditions are poised to benefit from Myka’s recent groundbreaking advances in interventional endoscopy systems and technology.
For patients with malignant gastric outlet obstruction–a particularly common occurrence in pancreatic cancer–intervention is urgent to allow for adequate nutritional intake. Hoping to spare patients from the potentially long and difficult recovery often seen with standard surgery for bypassing these types of obstructions, leading cancer centers have launched initiatives around performing this type of bypass procedure–known as gastroenterostomy or gastrojenunostomy–not via incisions in the abdominal wall, but using an endoscope passed through the patient’s mouth and into the stomach.
With only conventional endoscopic ultrasound (EUS) and x-ray guidance, however, endoscopic gastroenterostomy has proven to be an exceptionally challenging procedure. The challenges with conventional EUS gastroenterstomy have spurred cancer care specialists and patient advocacy groups to call for the development of new products and technologies to allow endoscopic gastroenterostomy to be performed in a greater fraction of patients–safely and smoothly.
As described by Dr. Munroe, Myka Labs navigation technology will give care teams the benefit of not just the standard display EUS and scope camera feeds, but also a real-time, three-dimensional representation of the stomach wall, the upper part of the small intestine, and other nearby anatomy. This display is output by the navigation module that is part of Myka’s innovative Connect interventional endoscopy system. The Connect navigation module generates the model by analyzing–in real time–data feeds from sources like endoscopic ultrasound together with the outputs of Connect ultraminiature sensor arrays. When combined with Connect scope-deployable anatomy-modifying device system components, this navigational and interventional guidance technology from Myka Labs represents a major step forward in achieving high-clinical-impact GI tract interventions without abdominal wall incisions.
The AGA Tech Summit, held in San Francisco and running from April 13 through April 15, is an annual event that brings together leaders in the GI field from academia, venture capital firms, start-ups, and others to look for ways to leverage technological advances to improve patient care.
Myka Labs, Inc., a start-up company pioneering advanced systems and technologies for less invasive interventions in the GI tract, is based in San Francisco, California with operations in Boulder, Colorado and Strasbourg, France.